By Prabhat Sinha | Head of Healthcare
Covid-19 exposed the inadequacy of the rural healthcare system in India. In remote villages where the Mann Deshi Foundation operates, there was a severe shortage of doctors, hospital beds and equipment. It brought to light the gaps in the healthcare services for last-mile communities. To ensure that the communities that we work with have access to basic healthcare needs, Mann Deshi Foundation opened a one-of-a-kind Diagnostic Centre in Mhaswad, Mann Taluka.
This centre is fully equipped with an outpatient department, a CT scan and radiology centre, a pathology lab, an x-ray centre and physiotherapy. The location of the Diagnostic centre plays an extremely important role in ensuring that healthcare services are accessible to last-mile populations.
As a continued post-pandemic healthcare intervention, the we organised two intiatives for Children. The first, is to provide free diagnostics and surgeries for congential facial deformaties such as cleft lip and palate, blood clots on the face, forward or backward jaw and ear and nose deformaties. The diagnosis and surgeries were implemented in colaboration with Cleft-Children International, Switzerland. The surgeon explained to our team that root cause of congential facial deformaties is due to the undernourshment of women during pergnancy and child birth. As a result, we have sucessfully completed srugeries for 11 children and looking forward to hosting more camps to identify more children that are interested in getting access to this healthcare service.
The second was a Children's Day Healthcamp in which over 350 children were given free medical check-ups. We focused on providing these check-ups for children below the age of 12. After the Health camp, we received feedback from our doctors that the root of the problem for many children in rural India was malnourishment. We have understood that even today, last-mile communities are struggling to provide healthy meals for their children which later on compromise their immunity. This brought to light that even though we have been able to manage Covid19 to a manageable extent today, we still have a long way to go in ensuring that employment generation and healthcare are made accessible for all.
Success story: Sheetal, said that she was informed about the Children's day Healthcamp through the radio. She decided to register her daughter for the medical check-ups. She was very thankful of the doctor's service and was happy to get her daughter checked by city doctors. Watch her video in the link below!
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